Topic: Jonathan Gruber

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was pitched and eventually sold to the American public on a foundation of lies. Many of the most egregious examples of the calculated mendacity of ObamaCare’s designers were exposed by the law’s very implementation, but a few of its more subtle deceptions and the duplicity of the law’s authors was revealed in a series of videos featuring the refreshingly honest Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist and health care policy advisor Jonathan Gruber. It is fitting that, just days before the Supreme Court issues what might be its most far-reaching verdict regarding the ACA’s fraudulence, Gruber is again in the news. Read More

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was pitched and eventually sold to the American public on a foundation of lies. Many of the most egregious examples of the calculated mendacity of ObamaCare’s designers were exposed by the law’s very implementation, but a few of its more subtle deceptions and the duplicity of the law’s authors was revealed in a series of videos featuring the refreshingly honest Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist and health care policy advisor Jonathan Gruber. It is fitting that, just days before the Supreme Court issues what might be its most far-reaching verdict regarding the ACA’s fraudulence, Gruber is again in the news.

As soon as the Affordable Care Act was implemented and revealed its hideous, multifarious visage to the public, the lies at the heart of the law became apparent even to observers committed to ensuring its success.

Premiums rose both for those on and off Affordable Care Act-related plans. Patients began losing their cherished and long-patronized doctors. The Supreme Court virtually rewrote the law when it ignored the administration and the solicitor general when it determined that the government had no right to penalize the public for failing to purchase health insurance. None of this would have come as a surprise to anyone who attended one of Gruber’s many lectures.

“This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes,” the health care policy advisor conceded, because “if CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies.”

As for the substance of the case the Court will rule on before the end of the month in King v. Burwell, Gruber appeared to validate the claims of those who believe the law was intentionally crafted to deny states the subsidies they presently enjoy if they did not set up a state-run insurance exchange. “There’s a lot of responsibilities on the states to set up these exchanges, like we did in Massachusetts, to regulate them and run them,” Gruber insisted in 2011. “Will people understand that, gee, if your governor doesn’t set up an exchange, you’re losing hundreds of millions of dollars of tax credits to be delivered to your citizens?”

Later that year, Gruber expanded on his frustrations with those Republicans who opposed this monstrous social engineering scheme that had taken the form of a health care reform bill. “If you’re a state and you don’t set up an exchange, that means your citizens doesn’t get their tax credits,” he noted.

Most infamously, Gruber insisted that none of this would have been possible if not for him and his fellows’ faith in the “stupidity of the American voter.” He added “lack of transparency is a huge political advantage.”

Perhaps fearing the obvious political fallout that would eventually result from these acerbic statements, those who invested their futures in the ACA rushed to insist that they had never heard of the man once praised by Democrats as the most accomplished man in his field. “I don’t know who he is,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said of Gruber. “He didn’t help write our bill.”

“I just heard about this,” President Barack Obama insisted amid growing national scandal. “The fact that some adviser who never worked on our staff expressed an opinion that I completely disagree with in terms of the voters is no reflection on the actual process that was run.”

According to emails belatedly obtained by House Oversight Committee investigators, however, Gruber had more fingerprints on the bill than its crafters would have preferred to admit. “The emails show frequent consultations between Mr. Gruber and top Obama administration staffers and advisers in the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services on the Affordable Care Act,” the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. “They show he informed HHS about interviews with reporters and discussions with lawmakers, and he consulted with HHS about how to publicly describe his role.”

The emails show Mr. Gruber was in touch with key advisers such as Peter Orszag, who was director of the Office of Management and Budget, an arm of the White House that oversaw federal programs.

He was also in contact with Jason Furman, an economic adviser to the president, and Ezekiel Emanuel, who was then a special adviser for health policy at OMB.

One email indicates Mr. Gruber was invited to meet with Mr. Obama. In a July 2009 email, he wrote that Mr. Orszag had “invited me to meet with the head honcho to talk about cost control.”

“Thank you for being an integral part of getting us to this historic moment,” according to Sept. 9, 2009 email to Mr. Gruber from Jeanne Lambrew, a top Obama administration health adviser who worked at HHS and the White House. In a November 2009 email, she called Mr. Gruber “our hero.”

The report quotes a Health and Human Services spokeswoman who adopted the supremely cynical tactic of insisting that all these new revelations contained in emails that the administration sought to keep secret amounted to “old news.” The transition from the Obama to Clinton White House appears to be proceeding apace.

It’s appropriate that Gruber would again become the focus of national controversy with just days to go before the Court decides whether it will again rewrite this hastily crafted law passed only as a result of parliamentary trickery. With just hours to go before that fateful moment, the nation was again reminded of the dishonesty that taints this law. Every step of the way, this White House has tried to foist onto the public legislation that would have long ago been scrapped had they been honest about its designs and effects. This latest bit of compulsive mendacity from the administration is sadly all too familiar.

When ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber recently found himself in hot water over his videotaped comments admitting to misleading Americans in order to pass the ACA, part of his argument was that getting the Congressional Budget Office’s blessing for the legislation required dishonesty and a lack of transparency. In doing so, Gruber found himself in the hot seat in congressional hearings, but he may have also done tremendous, and possibly irreversible, damage to the CBO. If that turns out to be the case, hindsight will eventually see current CBO chief Doug Elmendorf as the first casualty of that institutional damage.

When ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber recently found himself in hot water over his videotaped comments admitting to misleading Americans in order to pass the ACA, part of his argument was that getting the Congressional Budget Office’s blessing for the legislation required dishonesty and a lack of transparency. In doing so, Gruber found himself in the hot seat in congressional hearings, but he may have also done tremendous, and possibly irreversible, damage to the CBO. If that turns out to be the case, hindsight will eventually see current CBO chief Doug Elmendorf as the first casualty of that institutional damage.

The CBO is the ostensibly nonpartisan budget office that scores legislation based on its projected economic impact. With Republicans winning the Senate and thus controlling both houses of Congress in January, they will get to pick the next CBO director. And they have already decided it won’t be Doug Elmendorf. Republicans were divided on the merits of keeping Elmendorf, but one argument in favor of keeping him was actually an argument against it, if critics of the conservative wing of the party think through the implications of it.

Part of what bothers conservatives about the current CBO director is not only that he presided over the scoring of ObamaCare but that, as Jeffrey H. Anderson pointed out last month, the CBO apparently “effectively used Jonathan Gruber’s model” to do so. Gruber was being paid a healthy sum by the Obama administration to sell the ACA to all quarters. Anderson sums it up this way: “In other words, an overwhelming number of the ostensibly independent statements or scores that were made or published in support of Obamacare —from Krugman, Klein, Brownstein, the DNC, Reid, Pelosi, Sebelius, and even, to a significant degree, the CBO itself — were traceable to the support of one man and his model. And that man was Jonathan Gruber, who was secretly under contract with the Obama administration.”

Were Elmendorf to stay on, conservatives fear that their own future health-care legislation would be scored the same way, using Gruber’s model or its replica. If so, it would hamstring future reforms by requiring certain features, like the hated individual mandate.

But there’s another convincing reason for Republicans to appoint a new CBO head, and it’s actually the subtext of one of the reasons supposedly in favor of keeping Elmendorf. Conservative wonks tend to like Elmendorf. Here is Keith Hennessey’s argument for keeping him (made, obviously, before the GOP decided not to reappoint Elmendorf for another term), which others have echoed:

Dr. Elmendorf is not a conservative. He was originally chosen to head CBO by Congressional Democrats. He came from the left-of-center Brookings Institution. I think he is registered as an independent. I don’t know how he votes but I’d bet he’s a moderate/centrist Democrat.

I want to move economic policy to the right, not to the center-left. I think Dr. Elmendorf is the best pick for CBO because (a) he is unbiased and intellectually honest; (b) his background insulates his rulings and the Congressional Republicans who choose to reappoint him from accusations of bias; and, most importantly, (c) this combination greatly disadvantages the progressive Left who both dominate current economic debate within the Democratic party and who cannot refrain from intellectual overreach.

This is not a meritless argument, but it is one that unfortunately accepts too much of an already damaging narrative about conservatives. Hennessey notes, correctly, that Elmendorf rejected some of the Obama administration’s wackier claims, such as those underpinning the left’s deluded case for raising the minimum wage. He also points out that when this happened, conservatives “won those debates in part thanks to an assist from a CBO that was and was described as unbiased and nonpartisan.” (Emphasis in the original.)

But to get a sense of how such a debate harms conservatives, it helps to flip it. What happens if and when a GOP-appointed CBO head comes to a conclusion that damages liberal conventional wisdom? Hennessey imagines the scene: “The press coverage and public debate would have instead been about how “Congressional Republicans and their hand-picked conservative CBO Director said ______________.” … That is unfair. It is also an unavoidable consequence of a biased press corps that free market and small government conservatives would be foolish to ignore.”

I’m not so sure. It’s easy for those who are part of the policy debate to see these things as important. But it’s hard to ignore the idea that this overstates the role of the CBO in the public debate.

What it really boils down to is this: Republicans should be allowed to govern. Sometimes media bias can and should be heeded and even accepted. This is not one of those times, because to accept this narrative is to chip away at the idea that conservative governance is legitimate governance.

We see this in other areas as well, of course. Democrats populate the Justice Department with leftist legal bureaucrats, and the moment a Republican tries to add a few conservatives to the mix the media loses its mind, screeching “politicization!” The subtext of these fights is that conservatism is an ideology, while liberalism is nonpartisan good government. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Republicans ought to be allowed to govern too. When the GOP wins elections, those elections should have consequences as well. And they should not accept the idea that when conservatives run the government they are merely renting space from the left. If the media wants to run with biased stories about it, let them. The alternative is preemptive surrender before the GOP’s new majority is even seated.

Yesterday’s congressional oversight hearing on ObamaCare was, to those interested enough to watch, mostly about Jonathan Gruber, the ObamaCare architect who was caught on video repeatedly bragging to audiences about the level of dishonesty required to pass ObamaCare. Yet the hearing was also called for another reason: the Obama administration had been caught falsifying more enrollment numbers.

Yesterday’s congressional oversight hearing on ObamaCare was, to those interested enough to watch, mostly about Jonathan Gruber, the ObamaCare architect who was caught on video repeatedly bragging to audiences about the level of dishonesty required to pass ObamaCare. Yet the hearing was also called for another reason: the Obama administration had been caught falsifying more enrollment numbers.

To that end Marilyn Tavenner, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, was also at the hearing to be questioned by the committee. When the enrollment numbers were not meeting their benchmark, the government simply fudged the stats by counting dental plans, thus boosting the numbers by hundreds of thousands of enrollees. There won’t be any real consequences for the government repeatedly lying to the people, and so it won’t stop: central planners cannot keep honest records and still convince the people they are on the right track. Never have, never will.

But Tavenner’s appearance coincided with another revelation that will give her heartburn. The New York Timesreports that the Department of Health and Human Services inspector general has concluded his investigation into the availability of doctors for those covered under Medicaid–a major source of insurance coverage expansion under ObamaCare. What he found won’t shock you: enrollees are being lied to, again. The Times explains:

Large numbers of doctors who are listed as serving Medicaid patients are not available to treat them, federal investigators said in a new report.

“Half of providers could not offer appointments to enrollees,” the investigators said in the report, which will be issued on Tuesday.

Many of the doctors were not accepting new Medicaid patients or could not be found at their last known addresses, according to the report from the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services. The study raises questions about access to care for people gaining Medicaid coverage under the Affordable Care Act.

The health law is fueling rapid growth in Medicaid, with enrollment up by nine million people, or 16 percent, in the last year, the department said. Most of the new beneficiaries are enrolled in private health plans that use a network of doctors to manage their care.

Patients select doctors from a list of providers affiliated with each Medicaid health plan. The investigators, led by the inspector general, Daniel R. Levinson, called doctors’ offices and found that in many cases the doctors were unavailable or unable to make appointments.

It’s worth reading the whole story, because it’s just filled with such tidbits. Some are absurd, like the fact that “More than one-third of providers could not be found at the location listed by a Medicaid managed-care plan.” One-third of providers can’t even be found! The rest of the details, though, evince mostly outrage.

What is the result of the fact that Medicaid only pretends to offer health care? Well, the report, summarized by the Times and scheduled for release on Tuesday, offers the kind of brilliant insight we all have come to expect from a federal bureaucracy whose management would have to improve greatly just to be considered mediocre:

“When providers listed as participating in a plan cannot offer appointments, it may create a significant obstacle for an enrollee seeking care,” Mr. Levinson said. “Moreover, it raises questions about the adequacy of provider networks. It suggests that the actual size of provider networks may be considerably smaller than what is presented by Medicaid managed-care plans.”

Yes, when you can’t see your doctor, it “may”–may!–be an obstacle for you. The government apparently believes that Medicaid enrollees consider medical appointments roughly on par with social calls. It “may” be an obstacle to seeking care because, perhaps, the appointment with your doctor was to watch the game together, or some such. If you are actually seeking medical attention, however, the government’s disappearing doctor is always an obstacle.

And I’m not sure it “raises questions about the adequacy of provider networks” so much as it makes declaratory statements about the provider networks, such as: The networks are terrible.

Here’s another one: “a number of obstetricians had wait times of more than one month, and one had wait times of more than two months for an enrollee who was eight weeks pregnant. Such lengthy wait times could result in a pregnant enrollee receiving no prenatal care in the first trimester of pregnancy.” Completely unacceptable.

The Times, of course, gets a quote from Tavenner in response. Behold: “Inaccurate provider directory data may unnecessarily delay an enrollee from selecting a provider.” Tavenner is, just as a reminder, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. So enrollees are in great hands.

Medicaid is rife with such problems. The government is failing those who come to it for health care. So of course, under Obama, the government decided to put itself in charge of far more of the health sector. It is a general problem that the administration doesn’t know what it’s doing. When that incompetence is applied to health care, it becomes exponentially more dangerous for the citizens the government is supposed to be protecting. Heads should roll. They won’t, but they should.

Two weeks after the country first digested the revelation that one of the architects of ObamaCare confessed that its passage was largely the product of a series of deceptions aimed at deceiving the Congressional Budget Office, Congress, and an American public that was too “stupid” to grasp what was going on, it turned out the falsehoods haven’t ended. As open enrollment began for a new year of ObamaCare policies, it was revealed that some of the numbers promoted by the administration as proof of the Affordable Care Act’s success were falsified. While in and of itself this latest problem is not proof that the ACA is doomed, with the law’s existing credibility gap growing and more problems looming ahead in the coming year in which the balance between those who gain from the law may be matched by those who lose from it, perhaps its time for the administration to stop pretending this isn’t a pattern.

Two weeks after the country first digested the revelation that one of the architects of ObamaCare confessed that its passage was largely the product of a series of deceptions aimed at deceiving the Congressional Budget Office, Congress, and an American public that was too “stupid” to grasp what was going on, it turned out the falsehoods haven’t ended. As open enrollment began for a new year of ObamaCare policies, it was revealed that some of the numbers promoted by the administration as proof of the Affordable Care Act’s success were falsified. While in and of itself this latest problem is not proof that the ACA is doomed, with the law’s existing credibility gap growing and more problems looming ahead in the coming year in which the balance between those who gain from the law may be matched by those who lose from it, perhaps its time for the administration to stop pretending this isn’t a pattern.

As Politico reported:

House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa’s committee revealed Thursday that nearly 400,000 dental plans were included in recent enrollment figures that made it appear — wrongly — that the administration had hit the 7 million target for ObamaCare’s first year. The panel has called CMS Administrator Marilyn Tavenner and former ObamaCare adviser Jonathan Gruber— the center of a separate flare-up over the law’s passage — to testify next month about the “repeated transparency failures and outright deceptions.”

The second season of ObamaCare began last Saturday, and there’s been no enrollment update since Sunday morning, when HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell tweeted that there were more than half a million log-ins on HealthCare.gov on the first day and that 100,000 applications were submitted. By contrast, several of the 13 health insurance exchanges run by states have been regularly releasing traffic and enrollment-related data. Massachusetts is issuing daily traffic counts.

If this kind of fibbing seems familiar, it should be. From its inception, the ACA has been passed and sold to the American people in the way that Gruber described in his offensive video clips: as something that it was not. And whenever figures have been needed to analyze what was going on, it seems that the administration treats the public like a first grade arithmetic class: every figure gets rounded up.

While Obama, let alone the signature health-care legislation that is informally named for him, did not invent government falsehoods, this predilection for lying is not a minor issue given that these numbers are being used to defend its success as well as its legitimacy. And though its advocates think its acceptance is a done deal, what will happen in 2015 will make any further fibbing even more important. With the imposition of individual and employer mandates looming, the importance of the number of ObamaCare policies sold will be matched by the impact of the bill on employment as well as the insurance rates that may skyrocket in the new year.

In its initial enrollment periods the only significant figures about the ACA were the total of enrolled and throughout the process we have seen these numbers manipulated to include unpaid policies and now plans that are unrelated to the actual legislation. If this continues as the accounting becomes more complex, then it will be impossible for anyone to know what is going on or whether it is helping or hurting more Americans. In the first year, we know millions lost their insurance or their doctors despite promises from the president that this wouldn’t happen. In the second, the toll will extend to different groups that may soon find themselves counted among the growing numbers of ACA losers to be matched up against the millions who have benefited by receiving insurance that they might not otherwise have obtained.

A government with a credibility gap is always in trouble. But an Obama administration that can be counted on to tell the truth about ObamaCare is a government with an approval rating that will not only sink lower in the polls but also be unable to justify the president’s main legislative achievement. If its honesty does not improve, don’t count on its health-care law being able to move smoothly into a period of greater acceptance.

Despite the unmasking of ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber as a dishonest advisor hired by the Obama administration to mislead the public about the law, far too many commentators have still let Gruber set the terms of the debate about the lies used to pass ObamaCare. For example, an actual discussion over the “stupidity of the American voter” has ensued to pin down what exactly Gruber was saying. This requires putting words in Gruber’s mouth, so it’s worth pointing out what Gruber wasn’t saying.

Despite the unmasking of ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber as a dishonest advisor hired by the Obama administration to mislead the public about the law, far too many commentators have still let Gruber set the terms of the debate about the lies used to pass ObamaCare. For example, an actual discussion over the “stupidity of the American voter” has ensued to pin down what exactly Gruber was saying. This requires putting words in Gruber’s mouth, so it’s worth pointing out what Gruber wasn’t saying.

Last week Dan Drezner made the absolutely correct argument that, in Gruber’s defense, social scientists broadly agree with the premise that voters are “rationally ignorant.” Fair enough, but rational ignorance results from a kind of prioritization of a voter’s time and resources. What Gruber was saying was that he and the Obama White House had to design policy to fool voters who were invested in understanding the issue. He wasn’t really saying “stupid” as a stand-in for “rationally ignorant”; he was saying that the Obama administration had to be particularly dishonest and opaque because voters were making the very rational decision to invest their energy in the health-care debate and thus they had to be intentionally confused, misdirected, and in some cases out and out lied to.

Drezner’s point about voters is valid. It’s just not the same point Gruber was making.

What else wasn’t Gruber saying? Well, he wasn’t really saying the voters are stupid in the traditional sense of the word either. To see what I mean, I recommend Jake Tapper’s post today at CNN about the so-called Cadillac tax–the tax on expensive employer-provided health plans.

Tapper starts out by recalling Obama’s 2009 attempts to sell health-care reform by assuring voters that any tax on insurance plans would be aimed at high-end plans and not at average Americans. Crucially, he said, he had “taken off the table” getting rid of the tax deduction on employer-provided plans so that employers wouldn’t stop providing insurance.

And yet, Tapper points out, “That promise is completely at odds with how Gruber describes not only that provision of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, but the intention of that provision.” One of the videos, for example, has Gruber explaining that they sought to get rid of that subsidy but had to be creative about it, since the subsidy is popular. So they had to trick Americans into thinking they weren’t going to lose the subsidy Gruber was purposely taking away from them.

Here’s Tapper:

Gruber said the only way those pushing for Obamacare could get rid of the tax subsidy for employer provider health insurance was to tax the more generous, or Cadillac, plans — “mislabeling it, calling it a tax on insurance plans rather than a tax on people when we all know it’s a tax on people who hold those insurance plans.”

The second way was have the tax kick in “late, starting in 2018″ and have its rate of growth tied to the consumer price index instead of to the much higher rate of medical inflation. Eventually, the 40% tax on the more expensive plans would impact every employer-provided insurance plan.

“What that means is the tax that starts out hitting only 8% of the insurance plans essentially amounts over the next 20 years essentially getting rid of the exclusion for employer sponsored plans,” Gruber said. “This was the only political way we were ever going to take on one of the worst public policies in America.”

Now, the voter who didn’t crunch the numbers and plan out how a consumer price index-tied tax would, over twenty years, slowly eat up all the other plans as well by mapping out the complicated financial landscape of health costs, taxes, and government spending over two decades: does he sound “stupid” to you? Not exactly, right? The administration needed an MIT economist to devise this scheme; it’s not like Nancy Pelosi put this together on the back of a napkin.

Gruber didn’t outsmart the voters so much as con them. He made loads of cash by tricking non-economist Americans into losing their health insurance. (He’s a heck of a guy, isn’t he?)

What else didn’t Gruber say? Here’s a post from the Fix’s Chris Cillizza (hat tip to Kevin Williamson) in which Cillizza says that conservatives are so outraged about Gruber’s comments because “it’s not just that the Obama administration is trying to pull the wool over your eyes. It’s that they think you, conservative American, are too stupid to even notice.”

You may notice that what Cillizza said is exactly the opposite of the truth. Gruber wasn’t saying conservative voters were stupid; they were against the bill, as were independents. They understood that it was a scam. If Gruber was calling anyone stupid, it could only possibly have been liberal voters. The scam didn’t work on non-liberals; it worked just well enough on liberals to get the bill through Congress.

Perhaps that gives us some clue as to why there’s so much debate about what Gruber really meant. Because what he said, essentially, was this: the people who supported this bill, the people who voted for this bill, and the people in the press who parroted the administration’s talking points about this bill–they’re idiots. It’s not a reality leftists want to accept, but the infamously evasive Gruber couldn’t be clearer this time.

It will be some time before we know for certain whether the fallout from Jonathan Gruber’s embarrassingly candid revelations about the deceptions at the heart of ObamaCare will have a substantive impact on its future. Given the relevance of much of what he’s said to the Supreme Court’s deliberations about a challenge to the legality of its crucial subsidies, don’t bet against what some are calling Grubergate being considered a turning point in the history of this misbegotten legislation. But no matter what happens in the Court or in Congress, the story has already provided us with a fascinating insight into another kind of pretense: the supposed objectivity of the mainstream media which has, for the most part, ignored this story.

It will be some time before we know for certain whether the fallout from Jonathan Gruber’s embarrassingly candid revelations about the deceptions at the heart of ObamaCare will have a substantive impact on its future. Given the relevance of much of what he’s said to the Supreme Court’s deliberations about a challenge to the legality of its crucial subsidies, don’t bet against what some are calling Grubergate being considered a turning point in the history of this misbegotten legislation. But no matter what happens in the Court or in Congress, the story has already provided us with a fascinating insight into another kind of pretense: the supposed objectivity of the mainstream media which has, for the most part, ignored this story.

The virtual blackout of coverage of Gruber’s remarks in the broadcast networks and major newspapers such as the New York Times is, on its face, astonishing. That so many of these outlets that generally fall under the rubric of liberal mainstream media to have all come to the same conclusion that the Gruber story wasn’t news speaks to the way that members of this herd all tend to walk in lockstep on major political issues. But the defense of these decisions doesn’t wash.

Whenever you think there is a conspiracy it is really just something much more mundane, in this case I think it is the fact that this is a video that is a year plus old, and it is something that, we’re talking about a story that has been debated and debated and debated and so covered endlessly, I think oftentimes in newsrooms, there’s a sense that well, what’s actually new here? But, that said, the quote, the word stupid, that is news. And the way it is being used by conservatives, that is news, so that is why it should be covered by the nightly newscasts and CNN.

As for the idea that there is nothing new, let’s unwrap that contention. Gruber was well known to be a major player on ObamaCare and his statements about deceiving the Congressional Budget Office and counting on the “stupidity” of the American people would, in any context, be considered newsworthy. Anything that casts further doubt on the legality of the legislation—especially since some of Gruber’s comments contradict the liberal position on the King v. Burwell lawsuit—or provide fodder for congressional opponents who will seek to chip away at the Affordable Care Act is in and of itself also newsworthy.

The only reason why editors would chose not to treat it as worthy of coverage would be their desire to help the administration end the debate about its signature legislative achievement. To those who would say that critics of the mainstream media’s blackout on Gruber are indulging in conspiracy theories, I would answer by simply asking them to imagine a similar case in which a Republican administration with popularity ratings as low as those of President Obama in which a key figure in the formation of one of that government’s policies were found to have spoken in such a manner in public on video.

It is simply impossible to imagine that the New York Times would have treated such statements as a non-story. But that’s what they did this week. Search the New York Times website and, as of Friday afternoon, there isn’t a single mention of the Gruber controversy save for one opinion article in its Upshot section in which the significance of the story is downplayed. But there is nothing in the news sections or in the print edition of any part of the paper. Even if, as Neil Irwin wrote in the Upshot, this sort of thing were business as usual in Congress and the government, the Times would not have hesitated to treat evidence of such misconduct—let alone lies told to facilitate an attempt to remake one sixth of the American economy—by conservatives as front-page news.

The broadcast networks similarly shut down the story over the course of the week with no references until the last day and then only in passing. As for the cable networks, Fox has predictably run with it but with the exception of Jake Tapper’s show, CNN also largely kept away from it for days while MSNBC granted Gruber a softball interview with its least journalistic host—Ronan Farrow—whose only intent was to dismiss the whole thing.

That conservative outlets would treat Grubergate as earthshaking and liberal ones would say there’s nothing to talk about is understandable since there are partisan implications to the story. But while Fox and MSNBC are understood to be sources whose political slant is well known and the same is true for print and online publications that make no secret of their editorial missions, newspapers like the Times and networks like ABC, NBC, and CBS still hold themselves out as representatives of objective journalism. That this is an easily exposed pretense has not been much of a secret for a long time. The networks and the Times are as ideologically biased as the Rush Limbaugh Show on radio. The only difference is that Rush and other political talkers and writers don’t pretend to be sitting on Mount Olympus impartially giving the people the news.

Even in the world of opinion writing it is necessary to acknowledge the other side’s arguments if only to disprove them. But for liberals in the mainstream media, news that works against their side is something that must be contained if not simply thrown down an Orwellian memory hole. While President Obama and the Democrats should be ashamed of their role in lying to the American people about ObamaCare, their cheerleaders in the mainstream press should be just as embarrassed. That apologies won’t be forthcoming from either tells us all we need to know about the contempt for democracy and truth that is now routine in these precincts.

Reacting today to the furor caused by the revelations about the administration’s ObamaCare lies, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi did her best to dismiss the controversy. As far as the woman who rammed the Affordable Care Act through Congress on a party-line vote was concerned, Jonathan Gruber is a nobody who had no role in its passage. But unfortunately for her, a C-Span archival tape from 2009 was quickly uncovered that shows the former speaker citing Gruber as an authority on the bill. Ouch. But after we’re done chuckling at Pelosi’s chutzpah and calculating the impact of this latest Democratic fib on the course of the debate, this might be another moment for us to ponder just how much damage the cynical push for ObamaCare did to the fabric of American democracy.

Reacting today to the furor caused by the revelations about the administration’s ObamaCare lies, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi did her best to dismiss the controversy. As far as the woman who rammed the Affordable Care Act through Congress on a party-line vote was concerned, Jonathan Gruber is a nobody who had no role in its passage. But unfortunately for her, a C-Span archival tape from 2009 was quickly uncovered that shows the former speaker citing Gruber as an authority on the bill. Ouch. But after we’re done chuckling at Pelosi’s chutzpah and calculating the impact of this latest Democratic fib on the course of the debate, this might be another moment for us to ponder just how much damage the cynical push for ObamaCare did to the fabric of American democracy.

We’re not finished getting all of our reports back from CBO, but we’ll have a side by side to compare. But our bill brings down rates. I don’t know if you have seen Jonathan Gruber of MIT’s analysis of what the comparison is to the status quo versus what will happen in our bill for those who seek insurance within the exchange. And our bill takes down those costs, even some now, and much less preventing the upward spiral.

Judging by Pelosi’s convenient memory loss today, the conviction among those who foisted ObamaCare on the nation that they can always count on “the stupidity of the American voter” wasn’t just something invented by Gruber.

But as with Gruber’s comments, there will be plenty of people on the left who will dismiss this as nothing but a minor kerfuffle, a footnote to the achievement of the great liberal dream of a national health-care act. But words and deeds have consequences.

The problem with ObamaCare was, as Gruber has acknowledged, that if the voters or even the Congress that voted on it had understood what was in the bill, it could not have succeeded in gaining a majority, even one without a single Republican vote. Throughout the debate over the bill and its implementation, the one consistent theme has been dishonesty. From Pelosi’s own statement that the law had to be passed for members to know what was in it, to the president’s lies about consumers keeping their coverage and doctors, to the delay in enforcing the individual mandate and other provisions, to the current debacle over Gruber, advocates of the misnamed Affordable Care Act have never stopped lying or talking down to the American people.

In the last 60 years, we have seen confidence in government and politics decline bit by bit to the current situation where politicians of both parties are about as well respected as street walkers. This was the result of a series of unfortunate decisions and scandals that started with Vietnam, continued with Watergate (and every other subsequent scandal that generally is referred to by adding the word “gate” to something), was compounded by the distorted debate about Iraq, and now seems to be reaching a crescendo with ObamaCare.

One doesn’t have to hold a particular position on any of these issues to understand that when the American people perceive they have been deceived, it hurts more than the party caught lying. It hurts confidence in democracy and the rule of law. President Obama came into office and even reelected in 2012 buoyed by a wave of optimism about the nation that his historic election as our first African-American president created. But instead of building on the confidence placed in him, he resorted to the lowest and most cynical tactics to get his way on health care. Like Gruber and Pelosi, he undoubtedly felt the ends justified the means and that if it took a few lies to get his bill passed, it would be worth it. In the course of that campaign, he and his supporters called their Tea Party opponents who had raised up in protest against this massive expansion of federal power every vile name in the book and branded them as racists. Now today, unashamed, they look back on the lies they told and tell us to just move on since the debate is supposedly over.

But whether or not it is over—and, as I argued earlier, it is far from over—the damage they’ve done to the country and the government will live on. Leader Pelosi doesn’t have amnesia but she and everyone else who took part in this disgraceful episode should be deeply ashamed.

Liberals are in retreat this week as they recover not only from the historic defeat suffered by Democrats in last week’s midterms but also from the fallout from Jonathan Gruber’s confessions about the deceit at the heart of the effort to pass ObamaCare. The three videos that have surfaced in which Gruber strips away the veil of lies from the campaign to pass the misnamed Affordable Care Act is a major embarrassment for the administration. But while many on the right are treating this as a smoking gun that should doom President Obama’s health-care legislation to repeal, liberals are confident that this storm will pass and that the law will survive. But while they are right that nothing—not even a similar admission from the president himself—could wipe it away, they are wrong to think Gruber’s statements haven’t significantly altered the debate and may yet play a crucial role in its destruction.

Liberals are in retreat this week as they recover not only from the historic defeat suffered by Democrats in last week’s midterms but also from the fallout from Jonathan Gruber’s confessions about the deceit at the heart of the effort to pass ObamaCare. The three videos that have surfaced in which Gruber strips away the veil of lies from the campaign to pass the misnamed Affordable Care Act is a major embarrassment for the administration. But while many on the right are treating this as a smoking gun that should doom President Obama’s health-care legislation to repeal, liberals are confident that this storm will pass and that the law will survive. But while they are right that nothing—not even a similar admission from the president himself—could wipe it away, they are wrong to think Gruber’s statements haven’t significantly altered the debate and may yet play a crucial role in its destruction.

Writing for the Washington Post’s The Fix column, Aaron Blake writes to claim that no matter how much they scream about the videos of Gruber in which he acknowledges that the law was drafted so as to deceive members of Congress, the Congressional Budget Office, and the American people (whose “stupidity” ensured its passage), it won’t have an impact of the future of ObamaCare.

Blake is probably right when he says the debate about the law is already so polarized that nothing will alter the opinions of those who are for or against it. However, in citing the consistency of the polling on the legislation, he should also note that a majority of Americans have always opposed it. This runs contrary to the expectation of both hopeful liberals and fearful conservatives that once implemented, the ACA would become as popular as Social Security or Medicare.

That didn’t happen because unlike those government programs, which were controversial when first suggested but ultimately accepted by everyone, not everyone benefits from ObamaCare. Indeed, there may ultimately be as many, if not more Americans who are net losers from the law than there are winners who now have health insurance. While the disastrous rollout of the law and the exposure of President Obama’s lies about allowing consumers to keep their insurance and doctors if they liked them has already done damage to its reputation, once the more unpopular individual mandates are imposed in 2015 (they were postponed by the president in order to avoid more damage to Democrats in the midterms) and insurance rates start to skyrocket, ObamaCare isn’t going to be winning more fans.

Blake’s also right that this isn’t the first evidence of deceit on the part of the Democrats who passed the law in a party-line vote. Then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s infamous line about the law having to be passed in order “to find out what’s in it” is probably just as bad as anything Gruber said.

Moreover, his conclusion that the law will, in one form or another, remain on the books until 2017 at the earliest, is also inarguable. Repeal or a complete restructuring of the scheme will require a Republican-controlled Congress and a Republican in the White House, something that can’t happen until President Obama’s term in office is over.

But, even if we acknowledge all of this, it must be understood that Gruber’s comments illustrate one basic fact of American political life that liberals have a hard time accepting: the debate about ObamaCare is not only not over, it’s just getting started.

The president and other Democrats have been fond of mocking the GOP-controlled House of Representatives’ repeated votes on repeal. Each such vote was a futile exercise in symbolism since the Democrats still had the Senate and the White House. Further, such votes won’t be any more useful as long as Obama remains in office and Republicans lack a veto-proof majority.

But the impact of the law’s full implementation will, like it or not, generate plenty of debate about how to fix a scheme that is bound to cause more damage in the next two years. This will keep the ObamaCare debate alive and well. And anyone who thinks the Gruber comments won’t be endlessly thrown in the faces of the law’s defenders isn’t paying attention. That matters because whatever the American people think about the law, and most have always rightly disliked it, they don’t like being played for saps by elitist liberals. That means the Gruber admissions will be a gift that keeps on giving for Republicans right through the 2016 elections.

However, the greatest impact of this may be, as Blake acknowledges in passing, on the Supreme Court’s decision in King v. Burwell, the lawsuit that alleges that federal subsidies given in states that don’t have their own insurance exchanges as mandated by the law are illegal. Gruber’s comments illustrate that the insistence on each state having one isn’t, as Paul Krugman alleged earlier this week, a mere “typo” but a glaring flaw in the law that could sink the whole scheme.

In 2012, Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the court’s liberals and ruled ObamaCare constitutional in an opinion that led many to believe he thought it best to keep the Supremes out of a health-care debate that should be decided by the voters and Congress. What the White House should be most worried about is not the way Gruber’s candor is playing on the cable news channels but in Roberts’ mind. The open talk about the lies that led to the legislation’s passage might be enough to convince the chief justice to go along with conservatives who rule against the government and bring the ACA crashing down long before the GOP is able to finish the job.

If so, Gruber will have earned himself a place in American political history as the man whose honesty about his lies took down Obama’s greatest accomplishment.

Jonathan’s post details how the advocates of ObamaCare hid the truth behind a bodyguard of lies (to use Churchill’s marvelous phrase) in order to fool the people and get the bill passed. No wonder it has been deeply unpopular from the beginning.

Jonathan’s post details how the advocates of ObamaCare hid the truth behind a bodyguard of lies (to use Churchill’s marvelous phrase) in order to fool the people and get the bill passed. No wonder it has been deeply unpopular from the beginning.

This is not how democracy (from the Greek demos, meaning people, and kratos, meaning power) is supposed to work. But modern-day liberals and progressives (like those who run “people’s republics”) have never been in favor of people power. They want power to be exercised by fiduciaries for the people, which is to say themselves. They regard the common man as too stupid to know what is good for him. In explaining his now regretted remarks, Jonathan Gruber defended himself by saying they were off-the-cuff remarks made at an academic conference. Translation: The peasants weren’t supposed to have heard them. And he could only bring himself to say that the remarks had been “inappropriate,” not that they were incorrect.

He then proceeded to tell another lie in hopes of duping the people (and a Supreme Court justice or two) again. He repeatedly referred to the phrase in the law saying that subsidies could only be given to those who purchased insurance on the exchanges created by states as a “typo.” Well, thanks to Power Line here’s the text of the law:

The premium assistance amount determined under this subsection with respect to any coverage month is the amount equal to the lesser of—

(A) the monthly premiums for such month for 1 or more qualified health plans offered in the individual market within a State which cover the taxpayer, the taxpayer’s spouse, or any dependent (as defined in section 152) of the taxpayer and which were enrolled in through an Exchange established by the State under 1311 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act…. [emphasis added]

That sure doesn’t look like a typo to me. And it didn’t look like one to Gruber either until it became convenient for it to be one. As I pointed out the day before yesterday, Gruber himself, in 2012, stated that the whole purpose of that phrase was to coerce states into establishing exchanges so as not to deprive their citizens of subsidies.

At the heart of all the isms of the left lies a profound contempt for the common man. The reason is not hard to discern. Those isms were all created by intellectuals and there is no snob like an intellectual snob. Just ask Jonathan Gruber.

In a video that has gone viral over the last few days, one of the principal architects of ObamaCare confessed at an academic conference that the law was drafted in such a manner as to deliberately deceive both the Congressional Budget Office and the American people. MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber tried to walk back his October 2013 remarks in a softball interview with Ronan Farrow on MSNBC this afternoon yet there’s no denying that his embarrassing moment of candor in which he said the bill passed because of a “lack of transparency” and the “stupidity of the American voter” will influence the ongoing debate about the law. But while the mainstream media has spent the years since the misnamed Affordable Care Act passed mocking its conservative opponents, this ought to be a moment when Americans take stock of the corrosive impact on our democracy of the cynicism to which the president and his congressional allies sank during the campaign for his signature health-care legislation.

In a video that has gone viral over the last few days, one of the principal architects of ObamaCare confessed at an academic conference that the law was drafted in such a manner as to deliberately deceive both the Congressional Budget Office and the American people. MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber tried to walk back his October 2013 remarks in a softball interview with Ronan Farrow on MSNBC this afternoon yet there’s no denying that his embarrassing moment of candor in which he said the bill passed because of a “lack of transparency” and the “stupidity of the American voter” will influence the ongoing debate about the law. But while the mainstream media has spent the years since the misnamed Affordable Care Act passed mocking its conservative opponents, this ought to be a moment when Americans take stock of the corrosive impact on our democracy of the cynicism to which the president and his congressional allies sank during the campaign for his signature health-care legislation.

In a sense, Gruber’s statement doesn’t exactly break new ground. After all, if then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi could say that ObamaCare had to be passed before its contents could be understood, it’s not much of a revelation if one of its designers fesses up about the deceptions involved in the project and the breathtaking cynicism of its Democratic backers. Like the president’s repeated lies about consumers being able to keep their existing health insurance and doctors if they liked them, Gruber’s confession makes it clear that deception was at the heart of the debate on a law that overturned a key sector of the American economy.

For those who haven’t yet read or seen it, here’s what Gruber said at a University of Pennsylvania conference last year:

This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure that the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. Okay. So it was written to do that. In terms of risk-rated subsidies, if you had a law that said healthy people are going to pay in — if you made it explicit that healthy people pay in, sick people get money, it would not have passed. Okay.

Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically call it the stupidity of the American voter, or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical in getting the thing to pass, and, you know, it’s the second best argument. And I wish Mark was right, we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not. So there are things I’d wish I could change, but I’d rather have this law than not.

These remarks should weigh heavily on the consciences of the Obama administration and its allies who rammed it through Congress on a narrow party-line vote without knowing what was in it. Nor should it escape the notice of the Supreme Court as it weighs the arguments in King v. Burwell this session as it struggles with the question of whether the text of the law should be ignored in order to justify the administration’s efforts to roll out the health-care scheme. Liberals argue that the true intentions of the law’s authors should trump the fact that it was drafted so sloppily that it can easily be interpreted in such a way as to render the implementation of the legislation illegal. But since those who did the drafting are now being revealed as having deliberately lied about its contents, it seems quite appropriate that the Court stick to the text and the public arguments made at the time, not the secret agenda behind the law.

But leaving aside the debate about ObamaCare, Gruber’s quote and even his recent mea culpa in which he says he “spoke inappropriately” indicates that for Obama’s acolytes, winning means never having to say you’re sorry. Since they believed that this massive expansion of federal power that may wind up hurting as many people as it helps was the key goal of the administration, like Gruber, its apologists aren’t apologizing for having lied. What they regret is Gruber’s moment of weakness in which he foolishly told the truth about it.

Seen in that light, this is not so much about a gaffe as it is about the theory of politics that animates the Obama administration.

Though he came into office pledging the most transparent administration in history, what he has presided over is the one that is the most opaque, both in terms of its attitude toward the press as well as its belief that it can lie to the American people with impunity. Nations often believe that ends justify the means. Indeed, it would be impossible for wars to be fought otherwise. But however questionable such practices may be, it is one thing to rationalize wartime decisions, quite another to turn a blind eye to a philosophy that treats the American people as the enemy to be deceived.

They were not the first administration to lie to the American people about a policy question. But in passing ObamaCare, the president and his minions reached an all-time low in mendacity in order to get the desired result. Yet while some have benefited from ObamaCare, others have not. The administration and its supporters may believe all the lies are justified because of the expansion of health care to some. Yet in the coming year, as the individual mandate is implemented, more will suffer as the law wreak havoc on employment and the costs of premiums may skyrocket.

But the true legacy of ObamaCare may not just be the mess it has made of the health-care industry or the benefits some may have derived from it. It may instead mark another watershed moment in the history of American politics in which citizens came to understand that those who claim to have their best interests at heart would not scruple about lying to them about their intentions. The ends here not only did not justify the means but they also degraded American democracy in a way that we may never entirely recover from.

Paul Krugman is shocked that the Supreme Court would agree to hear the case regarding ObamaCare subsidies in states that have not set up their own exchanges, King v. Burwell, which I wrote about here. Krugman writes:

Paul Krugman is shocked that the Supreme Court would agree to hear the case regarding ObamaCare subsidies in states that have not set up their own exchanges, King v. Burwell, which I wrote about here. Krugman writes:

Last week the court shocked many observers by saying that it was willing to hear a case claiming that the wording of one clause in the Affordable Care Act sets drastic limits on subsidies to Americans who buy health insurance. It’s a ridiculous claim; not only is it clear from everything else in the act that there was no intention to set such limits, you can ask the people who drafted the law what they intended, and it wasn’t what the plaintiffs claim. But the fact that the suit is ridiculous is no guarantee that it won’t succeed — not in an environment in which all too many Republican judges have made it clear that partisan loyalty trumps respect for the rule of law.

This, of course, is vintage Krugman. While many Republican judges are all too willing for partisan loyalty to trump the rule of law, heaven forefend that a liberal judge would do any such thing. But it is the notoriously liberal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which sits in—where else?—San Francisco, that holds the record for 9-0 reversals by the Supreme Court. More than once they have been reversed 9-0 twice on the same day. And Krugman, typically, is also lying. He writes, “you can ask the people who drafted the law what they intended, and it wasn’t what the plaintiffs claim.”

OK, let’s do that and ask Jonathan Gruber, one of the main architects of ObamaCare. In 2012, long before this controversy arose, he was asked at a public forum about subsidies being limited to the exchanges set up by the states. He says that limiting the subsidies to state exchanges was entirely on purpose, in order to coerce the states into setting up the exchanges. “I think what’s important to remember politically about this,” he says, “is if you’re a state and you don’t set up an exchange, that means your citizens don’t get their tax credits.”

As a side note, a new video has just surfaced in which Gruber says that the “most transparent administration ever” deliberately used a lack of transparency in order to get ObamaCare passed. “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” he said. “And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass.” And he calls the American electorate stupid. Saying things like that in public, video cameras rolling, is about as politically stupid as politically stupid gets.

Nobody, except the liberal choir to whom the New York Times editorial page preaches, reads Krugman’s agitprop masquerading as an opinion column, but even by his standards this is pathetic.

Mitt Romney is the most experienced presidential candidate of the 2012 aspirants, having slogged through the 2008 primary and pre-primary campaigns. He has written a book and developed an easier, less stilted demeanor and public persona. He speaks authoritatively on foreign policy. But he has a big problem: ObamaCare looks a good deal like the ex-governor’s RomneyCare, his signature health-care legislation. A former advisor and MIT economist Jonathan Gruber remarks: “If any one person in the world deserves credit for where we are now (with the passage of the new federal law) it’s Mitt Romney.” Yikes.

Three of largest four — Blue Cross Blue Shield, Tufts Health Plan and Fallon Community Health — posted operating losses in 2009. In an emergency suit heard in Boston superior court yesterday, they argued that the arbitrary rate cap will result in another $100 million in collective losses this year and make it impossible to pay the anticipated cost of claims. It may even threaten the near-term solvency of some companies.

So until the matter is resolved, the insurers have simply stopped selling new policies. A court decision is expected by Monday, but state officials have demanded that the insurers — under the threat of fines and other regulatory punishments — resume offering quotes by today and to revert to year-old base premiums. Let that one sink in: Mr. Patrick has made the health insurance business so painful the government actually has to order private companies to sell their products (albeit at sub-market costs). . . .

On top of that, like ObamaCare, integral to the Massachusetts overhaul are mandates that require insurers to cover anyone who applies regardless of health status or pre-existing conditions and to charge everyone about the same rates. This allows people to wait until they’re about to incur major medical expenses before buying insurance and transfer the costs to everyone else. This week Blue Cross Blue Shield reported a big uptick in short-term customers who ran up costs more than four times the average, only to drop the coverage within three months.

Romney cites the differences between the bills — his contained no massive tax hike and didn’t savage Medicare. Mostly, he’s focused on the Tenth Amendment — the argument that the federal government shouldn’t and can’t constitutionally occupy the health-care field, which has been subject to state regulation. It’s far from clear that this will be enough to satisfy the Republican primary electorate, which is going to hear Romney’s opponents attack him for passing ObamaCare-lite. They likely will be proposing market-based plans akin to those which the GOP proposed in Congress. But for whatever reason — perhaps concern about reviving the flip-flop label — Romney isn’t disowning his past effort and he’ll have to withstand the onslaught if he’s going to do better than second place this time around. Every candidate has handicaps but in an election in which the Republicans are trying to elect a president to rip out ObamaCare before it takes root, Romney will have his work cut out for him, living down what was once a selling point for his candidacy.

Mitt Romney is the most experienced presidential candidate of the 2012 aspirants, having slogged through the 2008 primary and pre-primary campaigns. He has written a book and developed an easier, less stilted demeanor and public persona. He speaks authoritatively on foreign policy. But he has a big problem: ObamaCare looks a good deal like the ex-governor’s RomneyCare, his signature health-care legislation. A former advisor and MIT economist Jonathan Gruber remarks: “If any one person in the world deserves credit for where we are now (with the passage of the new federal law) it’s Mitt Romney.” Yikes.

Three of largest four — Blue Cross Blue Shield, Tufts Health Plan and Fallon Community Health — posted operating losses in 2009. In an emergency suit heard in Boston superior court yesterday, they argued that the arbitrary rate cap will result in another $100 million in collective losses this year and make it impossible to pay the anticipated cost of claims. It may even threaten the near-term solvency of some companies.

So until the matter is resolved, the insurers have simply stopped selling new policies. A court decision is expected by Monday, but state officials have demanded that the insurers — under the threat of fines and other regulatory punishments — resume offering quotes by today and to revert to year-old base premiums. Let that one sink in: Mr. Patrick has made the health insurance business so painful the government actually has to order private companies to sell their products (albeit at sub-market costs). . . .

On top of that, like ObamaCare, integral to the Massachusetts overhaul are mandates that require insurers to cover anyone who applies regardless of health status or pre-existing conditions and to charge everyone about the same rates. This allows people to wait until they’re about to incur major medical expenses before buying insurance and transfer the costs to everyone else. This week Blue Cross Blue Shield reported a big uptick in short-term customers who ran up costs more than four times the average, only to drop the coverage within three months.

Romney cites the differences between the bills — his contained no massive tax hike and didn’t savage Medicare. Mostly, he’s focused on the Tenth Amendment — the argument that the federal government shouldn’t and can’t constitutionally occupy the health-care field, which has been subject to state regulation. It’s far from clear that this will be enough to satisfy the Republican primary electorate, which is going to hear Romney’s opponents attack him for passing ObamaCare-lite. They likely will be proposing market-based plans akin to those which the GOP proposed in Congress. But for whatever reason — perhaps concern about reviving the flip-flop label — Romney isn’t disowning his past effort and he’ll have to withstand the onslaught if he’s going to do better than second place this time around. Every candidate has handicaps but in an election in which the Republicans are trying to elect a president to rip out ObamaCare before it takes root, Romney will have his work cut out for him, living down what was once a selling point for his candidacy.